He didn’t find love in Australia, so now he’s bringing his search across the Tasman.
Unlucky-in-love bachelor Nasser Sultan from 2018’s season of Married At First Sight Australia has applied to join the cast of MAFS NZ.
Three is taking applications for the show at the moment, and from his home in Sydney, the 52-year-old reality TV star told Now To Love that he applied to join the cast on Tuesday.
“Look, I didn’t find love in Australia so now I’m setting my sights abroad,” he said.
“I do love the Kiwi girls, and I love the country, the culture… The haka is one of my all-time favourite things.”
A spokesperson for Three said they were unable to comment on applicants, however, “we are still accepting applications from singles who are open to finding love as part of our social experiment, and all applications will be considered by the production and experts during the matching process.
“Our successful singles will be announced closer to the airing of episode one.”
Nasser, who has had two Kiwi girlfriends before who were both “magnificent”, reckons he’d be a great asset to the show.
“I could bring my personality and my experience.”
Regarded as one of the more colourful characters that the show has seen over the course of its history, Nasser was matched with Gabrielle Bartlett, who suffers from alopecia, on season five of the show. The couple parted ways before the experiment had ended, but not before Nasser had thoroughly entertained viewers with his OCD ways. There was the unforgettable furiously-vacuuming-in-his-underwear scene, the OTT skincare routine and his refusal to stay at Gabrielle’s apartment because the ‘juju’ wasn’t good.
After leaving the show, he was highly critical of MAFS, though, claiming he’d been painted as a villian, and accusing the show of being “fake” and heavily scripted. He also penned an open letter to the brides and grooms of the 2019 season of MAFS Australia, congratulating them on making it onto “one of TV’s most dysfunctional shows”.
So the question begs to be asked, why would he want to reappear on a show that he thought so little of?
“I was put off to begin with,” he explains. “I got a lot of hate mail afterwards, most racial or religious, but after a while I thought ‘who cares if people call me a dickhead?’ I did actually have fun on the show.”
He also believes the NZ version of MAFS is more authentic: “The New Zealand show is more in its virgin stage, so I think it’s more genuine. I’ve watched a bit of it and people seem to go on it genuinely looking for love.”
Nasser also says he’s lonely and has had no luck with the ladies since appearing on MAFS a year ago.
“I live on my own, I have one sister, I don’t have parents so, yeah, I am very lonely. It does get boring, you can only go surfing so much every day.
“I’ve got a lot of people that I talk to but it’s not every weekend I hang out with people. People are married, they’ve got things on.
“You get to a stage in life where you’re more mature and you know what you want,” he says. “I would like to meet someone and settle down. And I think I could make it work. You know what, I would be more than happy, if I did go on it and it worked out, to live there [in NZ] or have her live here [in Australia], it’s only three hours away.”
Watch: Nasser’s opinion on the new couples on MAFS Australia. Article continues below
“I’d still have my OCD, don’t worry about that,” he jokes, “and I still speak my mind, but for me this would be a new game, a new show, a new situation.
“Unfortunately I got matched with the wrong person,” he says of his marriage with Gabrielle. “We had nothing in common, but we tried and tried and tried. It wasn’t easy.
“But you look at what happened when they brought John back.” (John Robertson was brought back to the 2018 season of MAFS Australia, after being unceremoniously rejected the first time he appeared on the show).
“He was a completely different man and he and Melissa were very well suited.”
Nasser would ideally like to meet a woman in her forties.
Now’s the time to change the culture of MAFS, he says. “Start allowing older people to enter these shows, real people,” he says.
“And reality TV needs to move away from the fighting and bickering and actually focus on people’s love.”
